Becoming an Innovative Learning Environment ― The Making of a New Zealand Secondary School

This book traces how a new school, physically designed as a modern learning environment, has come into being in New Zealand. A key feature is how it designs its curriculum for future citizens. The book explores how flexible curriculum and assessment options support the provision of a well-balanced, coherent and future-oriented learning programme. It also illustrates how the school is implementing its vision and copes with being different from other schools which understand and embody the New Zealand Curriculum as well as the NCEA qualifications system in more traditional terms. School leaders’, teachers’ and foundation students’ thinking and perspectives about what it’s like to become a new school are highlighted and shed light on what is possible within an evolving education system.

Noeline Wright is a teacher educator whose work centres on the secondary school sector. She helps prepare those entering secondary teaching via graduate initial teacher education programmes. Her research interests span digital technologies in secondary school settings, secondary schools as modern learning environments, and possibilities for integrated learning for students. She has worked closely with a local secondary school to investigate how teachers from different subject areas incorporate mobile digital technologies into their lessons, and what changes occur in their thinking and practices as a result. She has published on pedagogy and digital technologies, social media in initial teacher education, and on new schools as modern learning environments. She has been funded by the national Teaching and Learning Research Initiative programme to investigate the inception of another new secondary school.